


Fortune Favours The Bold

by ImogenSmiley



Series: RinReiGisa [7]
Category: Free!
Genre: Broke Rei, Coffee Shop, Gothic, Happy Halloween, Horroresque, I can't write smut and thus it isnt there, Implied Sexual Content, Implied one night stand, Lowkey gothicana bc its spoopy day, Lowkey inspired by The Raven, M/M, Multi, Novelist Rei, One Night Stands, Poly, Polyamorous Character, Polyamory, Prodigal Son Ryugazaki Rei, Prodigal Writer, Prodigies, Prodigy Rei Ryugazaki, Rei-centric if you couldn't already tell, Struggling Writer AU, Where art thou inspiration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 13:18:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21254012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImogenSmiley/pseuds/ImogenSmiley
Summary: ‘Fortune favours the bold. It always had. Fortuna always leaned toward the embrace of a man that could shower her in all of the goodness, the vanity, the profane. She was the muse for the artists that she discarded like her soiled bed sheets. Fortune favours the people that reach out to her, brazen with ambition and promise. She doesn’t open her bed to the likes of the lazy.She bathed in red wine and goat’s milk, tanned skin glowing with the light of a thousand candles, which she’d put out with her dripping hair.’Rei Ryugazaki raked a hand through his hair, frowning at the words he’d branded the sheet of notebook paper with. With his brows knitted together, he wrote a final sentence down before collapsing into bed.‘Fortune’s a whore.’





	Fortune Favours The Bold

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, have some OT3!

It’s been months since Rei had a good idea. He’d never felt so sure of anything as he had done pursuing the written word. But after releasing rough manuscripts into the wilderness, each receiving high praise from critics, he was stumped. He’d mused about the beauty of the world around him, from the eyes of a boy too poor to ever experience immersion and assimilation there. He wrote like a stranger, lusting for the embrace of an attractive person that crossed his path.

He hadn’t travelled in a while; he didn’t have the time or the means. As successful as his works had been, making a living off his creations was something he was unable to achieve yet. Not that he was working anywhere else.

For the moment, he lived in a scabby bedsit overlooking the train station, with horrible noise pollution and a serious lack of thermal insulation. Noise pollution came with the territory, and the hands of mould were crawling toward him, seeming to draw nearer every single day.

But as long as he had a laptop and the will to create, he knew he’d be okay.

Except inspiration had decided to leave him, longing for another one night stand with the words of the muses. He longed for the ecstasy that came from awe-inspiring literary experiences. He’d read more books in his dry slump than he felt he had in his entire young-life, eyes burning through each and every page for a note, an innuendo, a spark. A message left from his muse, telling him where to go. How to find him.

Rei was growing desperate as the rumble of trains passed him by again. His body was rattling from too much caffeine from the pot he’d brewed, as he thumbed through another beaten up paperback written in a language he longed to craft as well as his own.

Classics were thrust toward the encroaching fingers of the mould, and eventually collected and placed as far from its hold as he could keep it. He couldn’t afford to replace library books. He was near destitute. He was left eating food past its sell-by date and stock piling instant ramen. He’d write love notes on receipts, fold them into paper birds and set them free to be caught by the wind, hoping that his desperate pleas would fall upon the right ears. Instead, usually, the birds were stricken down by an incoming train, and disappeared underneath the feet of commuters and into tracks to be ripped apart.

Rei sighed to himself, staring out of his window. He was desperate for a release, craving a sensation he had never experienced, feeling the phantom weight of cigarettes he never smoked in his fingers. He wondered whether buying a pack would ease him into a new cycle of ideas. He shook his head, he was having bad enough luck as it was, there was no need to stride back into the building hand in hand with a potential addiction.

He pressed his lips into a fine line, feeling the bitter claws of winter tear across his cheeks, wondering whether it was worth staying up and hoping that the smile of the moon above him was one of sympathy and encouragement, over scorn. The sky tended to mock his efforts. After all, his brother had just jetted off to some exotic location with whatever girl he was seeing, and was soaking up the sun with her under his arm. Rei wondered whether his brother would bother to send a postcard. He wouldn’t care to read what he’d say, he’d just want a glimpse of somewhere new.

Rei exhaled audibly, closing the window and trudging toward his mattress. He had no bed, just his old mattress on the cool wooden floor. He kept his laptop on standby and let the coffee in his machine grow tepid, while the lull of sleep ensnared him once again.

He awoke the next morning to the laugh of crows, ready to scavenge for abandoned snacks on the platforms of the station below him. Rei had yawned, the sun was up but hidden within the arms of the clouds. With a white sky overhead, and the familiar beat of passing trains to accompany him, Rei turned back to the literature he’d discarded. Almost tripping over his mug of dejected coffee, he staggered through the morning with a haphazard lack of grace. He stubbed his toe on a hardback book on his way back to his makeshift work space.

Having little money to spend, due to an inconsistent volume of royalties coming from his previous works, he knew he had one of three choices: admit defeat and return to living in his parent’s home, in the childhood bedroom, that smelt of lavender and soap, continue to suffer and write a less-commercially successful book, and risk it destroying the career he had hoped to achieve as an esteemed writer, or the third option, succumb to malnutrition and allow the world to take him has he is; a tragic, and depressed artist.

He frowned, drawing scalding caffeine to his lips and drinking it in spite of the steam that fogged up his red glasses. He grimaced at the temperature, but didn’t move the cup from his lips. The thought of cauterising his lips with scalding black coffee for the sake of inspiration ceased to exist once he registered the pain he was feeling. He jerked back, spilling a dribble of coffee down his woollen pyjamas.

He set the mug down and reached toward his laptop, glaring at the screen a partially written manuscript stared up at him. He put it down just as quickly as he’d picked it up. Another day and there were still no words. How was he going to get a book out if he couldn’t even string together a sentence?

He rose to his feet, pacing the length of the small flat, toes curling as he passed over the patch of the ground that the cold fingers of the mould on his walls had reached to. He shuddered, skittering away from the darker wood. He raked a hand through cerulean bedhead and huffed.

The document on his laptop was sneering at him from across the room. The story had barely begun and Rei already wanted rid of the manuscript. Stories of adultery and affairs tended to sell to a completely different market. Maybe he was trying to be too different, too edgy, too real.

This woman that the man was sleeping with was a deity, and the only thing Rei couldn’t seem to get right at this point was the description. He lacked the understanding of how to even articulate the beauty that exuded from the woman; the seductress that would drive his protagonist to madness and suicide.

He succumbed to the allure of better-tasting caffeine. Counting the coins in his pockets, he had enough for one drink. He needed to get out of the house. Bundling up his supplies, the lethargic author staggered out of his apartment. He set up shop in a local café, with an iced coffee as it would take longer for him to drink it.

He plugged in his computer, put a pair of broken headphones on, and turned his music up. He glared at the words on his screen, which contorted into accusations and mockery in front of his very eyes. He pawed at glasses, as the door swung open and a couple sauntered in, fingers laced together. They were young, with a significant height difference.

The taller of the two boys had hair the colour of velvet cushions in renaissance paintings, a deep burgundy like spilt wine on satin. It was long and choppy, hanging loosely toward his collarbones. Unruly and un-kept, his hair swished without product, parted where it fell, being pushed back off his face with his hand instead of gel or clips. He wore an ash grey t-shirt with a plunging v-neck exposing his upper-chest, with several chains around his neck. On top of his t-shirt was a heavy-set black leather jacket, worn and cracked from age. He wore ripped skinny jeans that had bigger gashes in them than there was fabric.

He was talking in a hushed voice, each word seemed cautious, careful, like he didn’t want to offend the boy in his company, who clung to his sleeve. His eyes shone like precious jewels, and Rei wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been wearing eyeliner or mascara to accentuate the colour.

His arm was draped around a shorter boy. He stood a head shorter than his partner with bright blonde tufty hair, pinned back off his face with an ornate clip of pinkish stones and flowers. He wore a deep plumb-ish coloured shirt with round puffy sleeves and ruffles down the front, with a pair of black skinny jeans and knee-high leather boots. A rucksack beat against the blonde’s back, hanging low toward the small of his back instead of toward the shoulder-blades. He bounded forward with more energy pent up in him than the redhead. His movements were fluid and large, each gesture exaggerated; even his walk was oozing excess energy, his hair bouncing behind him, as if independent from his body, as he walked with his partner.

Both boys turned to face Rei, who couldn’t turn away, or allow his gaze to flicker back to the light of the computer screen. He felt so dishevelled by contrast, as, he was sure the other patrons did too. Rei had barely had the energy to get ready, so tired by the weight of his work. His hair was combed, but was jutting out in random directions due to him having run his fingers through it often enough, and his attire was simple; an oversized jumper and jeans. The jumper was a dark mahogany colour and was hanging off him, stretched out until barely hanging together by an old tumble dryer.

Their eyes didn’t leave him too. Even when they each spoke to the barista, they couldn’t help but hair their eyes flicker back to Rei. He’d been typing nonsensical words; descriptions, sensations, onto his document which made no sense alone. Nor were any spelt correctly, having been written as he gazed at the two boys.

The blonde’s eyes were unreal, like flowers had been preserved in glass and kept youthful and vibrant for an eternity, his were a magenta like pansies, they bloomed with every blink, framed by thick, and long eyelashes. His rounder features were suited to his eye shape and colour. They glittered under the yellow artificial lights of the coffee shop.

The couple had decided to stay in the shop, despite having seemed like they were in such a rush to head to wherever they were going. They took a table for four opposite Rei, drinking in the exhausted writer’s face and body from across the room. He suddenly become parched, and ended up drinking his coffee hastily, leaving him without a reason to linger in the shop. Except the equally as beautiful boys.

The next thing Rei knew he was in bed, the redhead, Rin to his left, and the blond, Nagisa, to his right. They had somehow squashed onto the single mattress, all exhausted by their brief tryst. The books that littered Rei’s dingy apartment had been cast aside, thrust toward the wall, and his mug had been broken in Nagisa’s haste to remove his boots.

Rei couldn’t remember how they ended up there. He didn’t care. Just having them beside him felt like the luckiest person alive. He propped himself up, reaching for a battered, spiral-bound notebook and carved a few words into up-facing page with the pen struck through the unwinding spine.

It was rough, it was fluid and it was going to need a lot of editing. But he had it; the first extract he felt invested in in months:

‘Fortune favours the bold. It always had. Fortuna always leaned toward the embrace of a man that could shower her in all of the goodness, the vanity, the profane. She was the muse for the artists that she discarded like her soiled bed sheets. Fortune favours the people that reach out to her, brazen with ambition and promise. She doesn’t open her bed to the likes of the lazy.

She bathed in red wine and goat’s milk, tanned skin glowing with the light of a thousand candles, which she’d put out with her dripping hair.’

Rei Ryugazaki raked a hand through his hair, frowning at the words he’d branded the sheet of notebook paper with. With his brows knitted together, he wrote a final sentence down before collapsing into bed.

‘Fortune’s a whore.’

When Rei woke in the morning, he was alone in the apartment, any traces of the boys had disappeared into the night, dissipating by dawn like mist or dew drops. He eased himself up in the bed, scanning the desolate space, feeling more alone in it than he thought possible. He rubbed his eyes and reached for his glasses.

That’s when he caught sight of the notebook. In two different colours, his late-night musing.

Fortune’s not a whore, they’re polyamorous.

Rei snorted a laugh, seemed maybe Fortuna wasn’t just one person.

He opened a new, fresh word document, and started typing.


End file.
